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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS REGIONALS: BOISEMarch 20, 2009Ken BoneJeremiah DominguezJamie JonesAndre MurrayBOISE, IDAHO Xavier – 77 THE MODERATOR: We'll have an opening statement from Coach Bone and then take questions for the student-athletes. COACH BONE: Well, I'm proud of the guys. I felt like we were extremely focused and ready to go and we did the best job we could. I thought they left everything on the court and we just happened to run into a very good Xavier team, which we knew ahead of time, but they proved it tonight that there's a reason why they're No. 4 seed. They were very difficult to stop on one end and hard to get good shots off against on the other. THE MODERATOR: Take questions for the student-athletes, please. Q. If any of you guys can just talk about the overall effect that Xavier's defense had throughout the course of the game. It wasn't necessarily forcing turnovers, but just the wear and tear that they put on you guys, can you talk about that? JAMIE JONES: I just thought Xavier was, they're a real solid team, they're big and physical and I think they took us out of some stuff. But I think that we just didn't have just the motivation at the end. I don't know. It was just tough, a tough team, a good team. Q. Jeremiah, can you talk about you guys take that one-point lead and then things kind of unraveled from there. Just talk about the letdown of the team, you guys get your first lead and then you're kind of climbing uphill from there. JEREMIAH DOMINGUEZ: Yeah, we had got the one-point lead and we had some -- after that we had two bad turnovers, one from myself and another. And once you get -- and they went on a run, they went on a 10-0 run and then once we hit that 10-0, it was just playing catchup ball from there. And playing against Xavier, it's a tough team to come back from. They're just so solid on defense and offensive side of the ball, so we put ourself in a hole and we couldn't dig ourself out. Q. You guys have played a very tough schedule. How did these guys compare to the Washingtons, the Gonzagas that you played against. ANDRE MURRAY: They're a very similar team. They're a very good rebounding team just like Washington, like Washington, Baylor, like Gonzaga. So we have seen this before and I feel like we should have been ready, but we had a little bit a letdown throughout the game. So it was very similar to the teams we played before. Q. Jeremiah, it's a bittersweet time for you, but you look back on your two years here, and you got to be proud of what you guys have accomplished going two straight NCAA tournaments. JEREMIAH DOMINGUEZ: Yeah, after transferring here I knew we had a chance to have a great team. After those two years, I had the best experience of my life and I was happy to transfer to Portland State. And I'm just happy that we got here the past two years and it's all done now, but I had a great past two years of my life and I'll always remember this. Q. Jeremiah, talk about what they did defensively to you in the second half. You were held scoreless and they really paid a lot of attention to you. JEREMIAH DOMINGUEZ: Just them being solid. I know when I came up on the balls they were trapping me the second half and they just made every shot difficult for me to get off and it worked. So it was a good defense. THE MODERATOR: Okay, thank you, guys. We'll excuse the student-athletes and take questions for Coach Bone. Q. When Andre Murray hit the three, cut the lead to seven at the end of the first half momentum was kind of shifting, what did you tell your team at half time? COACH BONE: Talked about the fact that if we could get the game to the eight-minute mark where we were right in it, then I thought we had a great chance. Because it felt like maybe the four seed in Xavier, like a lot of teams, might tighten up a little bit and play not to lose. And it felt like we would continue to play to win. But it didn't work. Xavier's very good. They came out right away and set the tone, kind of put us in our place, and immediately outscored us and I don't know the stats, but it seemed like about 11 or 12 to two or three. And they did a great job. Xavier's a very good basketball club. So I don't want to take anything away from our kids, the Portland State guys, but we ran into a very good team who played well. Q. Coach, can you talk a little bit about how tough it is to pull an upset in this tournament. People always talk about upsets and March madness for a team from a small conference like yourself. What does it take and how hard is it to win these games? COACH BONE: Well, I think you have to shoot the ball well. And we shot it decent, but not like you have to do to pull off a win against a team the caliber of Xavier and a team that's experienced as Xavier. They're not just all of a sudden a four seed this year, I think it was last year they got to the Elite 8. They have had a tremendous amount of success over the year, over the years, and they didn't panic. We hit the shot, went up 25-24, and they acted like it was, you know, nothing to them. They have been there before and they played like it. I think it's difficult to get in the tournament as a 13 seed and pull an upset. But it's been done before. We just didn't happen to do it today. Q. You guys played so hard last year against Kansas. I know you were really proud of that team. Didn't look in the second half that you guys had much energy. Was that due to something Xavier was doing or did you just feel like your guys didn't have it? COACH BONE: I don't think I did a good job substituting guys. I probably kept a few kids in longer than I should have and just really tried to milk it. The timeouts are two and a half minutes long, the half time is 20 minutes long. So I tried to use that in a way to really milk it with some of our key guys. But I probably should have called a time out or two also early in the second half. And I didn't do that. So that first 10 minutes of the second half was wasn't very good for me. I probably should have done a better job personally. Maybe we would have had a little more energy. Q. Are you a big statistics guy and are there any stats that are more important than others to you when you look at your team and what you're trying to do? COACH BONE: Rebounds are. Rebounds are very, very important. It's usually the first thing I look at. And then getting to the free throw line. And unfortunately those are probably the two areas that we were the weakest at this evening. We got out rebounded 34-21 and they had 10 offensive boards to our 4. And then on the free throw line, two of our better shooters, Andre Murray and Jeremiah Dominguez, together went 2-8. And you add up a few of those free throws and a few offensive boards that they got, not that it would have been a one point game, but maybe it's a six or eight point game with eight minutes to go, like I mentioned. Q. Can you just talk about your 3-point shooting and how well you guys have done that this year and how you feel that you guys really shot the ball from behind the arc tonight? COACH BONE: Well, we shot it decent. We shoot right about the percentage that we did tonight, I think, 38 percent. What I didn't expect was them to shoot so well. They came out and hit 6 out of 12 in the first half. And again, they played with a lot of poise, they seemed comfortable, when they got a good look, they buried it. But that's kind of who we have been all year. We shot 46 shots, 21 of them tonight were threes. And we made eight. Which is right about like I said the percentage we usually shoot. Q. I know you probably haven't thought about it too much yet, but what do you think this team's going to look like moving forward without Jeremiah running the point any more? COACH BONE: It will look bigger. (Laughter.) At that position anyway. But we'll miss him. There's no doubt. The kid is just a gamer and I wish I could have done something to help him get better and more looks at the basket the second half. We did, we ran a couple specials for him, but -- in fact we ran a number of them in the second half to try to get him a look. Xavier did a great job defensively. We were running him off screens and throwing a couple little wrinkles in of what we usually do, tweaking some things, and doggone it if they weren't just there on the catch. And then like Jeremiah said, they did a very good job of guarding the on-balls the second half. The first half that was our bread and butter. No matter what we did, we ran on-balls and we had good success with him. And in the second half they either switched it or they showed hard and trapped it, and we were not able to overcome that to get him good shots. But looking to the future, we're going to miss Jeremiah a lot. The last two years we have had 46 wins and two trips to the NCAA tournament and I don't know I don't know if that would have been possible without him. THE MODERATOR: Okay, thank you, coach. COACH BONE: Thank you. End of FastScripts |
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